The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Many mobile computing devices such as cellular phones, tablet computers, notebooks, etc., incorporate applications that accept push notifications from a backend server. In general, a push transaction is initiated by the information publisher in contrast to a pull transaction that is initiated by the receiver or client. Users often express interest in receiving push notifications through subscriptions and other preferences that they express in advance of the push/pull transaction. Cloud-to-Device Messaging (C2DM) is a push service that allows backend servers to send data to applications on client mobile computing devices (e.g., Android® and other types of smart phones). The service provides a simple, lightweight mechanism that servers can use to tell mobile applications to contact the server and fetch updated data. However, the C2DM messaging service cannot send a lot of user content via the messages. Rather, C2DM merely informs a mobile device application that there is new data on the server so that the application can fetch it.
Mobile devices may include global positioning system (GPS) applications or other applications and related hardware. A mapping application may communicate with a global positioning system (GPS) transceiver or other GPS hardware on the device and a backend application server to fetch a digital map of an area around the device's current position or a search location. Some mobile computing devices incorporate social networking applications and functions with GPS location functions. For example, the Latitude® application by Google Inc. or the Foursquare® application by foursquare.com allows users to track other users' locations or activities via a network-connected mobile device. However, current social location applications require a user to manually submit his or her location or, in a C2DM system, the application only sends a current user location periodically to the backend server. When a user then accesses the application, the user may only view other users' locations that have either not been updated or are outdated due to period updates.